Going To Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective On Wholeness

GOING TO PIECES WITHOUT FALLING APART: A BUDDHIST PERSPECTIVE ON WHOLENESS By Mark Epstein, M.D.; Broadway Boobs, 1998; $23.

This book begins with the following epigram: "Men are afraid to forget their minds, fearing to fall through the Void with nothing to stay their fall. They do not know that the Void is not really void, but the realm of the real Dharma." The quote is from Huang Po, a Zen teacher, and it lays out the problem this book addresses. According to Mark Epstein, many of our problems grow out of a fear of emptiness, a phobia actually. While psychotherapy tries to cure this emptiness, Buddhism takes an opposite approach. It sees emptiness as the birthplace of knowledge or true understanding. As long as we fear emptiness (or what we perceive as emptiness) and as long as we fill it with distractions and a constant chatter in our heads, we are doomed to remain separated from the understanding that comes when we embrace emptiness. We cannot, as they say, be present. It's a classical reading of Buddhist thought.

This idea isn't peculiar to Buddhism by any means. Most of the world's great religions mention it, and even Vienna's most famous cigar smoker, Sigmund Freud, who had no use for religion at all, gave it a nod. But whereas this idea is only a detail in most religions, Buddhism makes it central and is particularly adept at discussing the problem of emptying ourselves so that we can be awake to the present. Over the centuries, as its ideas evolved, Buddhism developed a whole vocabulary of puzzles and nonlinear language for this purpose. And yet it is this very language that sometimes makes people shy away from hearing what Buddhism has to say. One of Epstein's strengths is that he gets at Buddhist thought by means of everyday language. "In Buddhism," he writes, "breaking through the thinking mind's isolation requires something other than just analysis. It requires a new way of being with the mind, one in which its observing functions take precedence over its reactive ones." Epstein's description is not as pithy as BE HERE NOW and it won't fit on a bumper sticker, but it could be a lot easier for some people to understand.

What helps Epstein express these ideas so clearly may be that he is not only a Buddhist, he is a psychiatrist, and as such, he can talk in terms that people unfamiliar with Buddhism can very easily grasp. Psychotherapy and religion are usually perceived as separate and sometimes even antithetical to each other. But they deal with many of the same questions: What is my place in the world? How can I find peace? How should I relate to my fellow man? Epstein at the very least helps the reader understand how the practice of Buddhism can contribute to a person's ability to answer these questions.

This is not a big book--to stretch it over 200 pages the editors left a lot of blank space and included both a section of notes and an index--but it's one well worth getting and reading.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Weider Publications
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